So.. ive been told to do a report from Shajir, cool by me.

first of all I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for a good time, well run tourney with no BS problems. i F-ing love the UFS player base!!

now down to business

Thursday - not too much to say we drive for ~8hrs get to the room take the walk to get our badges (as amazing as our room was and such, that 40min walk was a bad idea) get rained on, meet up and chat with everyone. head back. go to sleep. not much there...

Friday -

630AM - Tourney Starts:Im asleep when Keith gets the call saying the ATL crew are here. First things first... get under the covers completely. Not 2 mins later i hear "Where's Mike" and proceed to almost be raped by Ben. and slapped like 4 times (this happens a lot). after that we chill get ready and leave

Start to end of tourney: Heres where things get fun
I was running my Chun Li
Keith was running his Zi Mei
and Shajir was running Gill

Round 1 Win
FoxHound VS Revenge of the Clam Chowder
We win the die roll. so first things first we pair chun li against... Blah i cant remember the character, i do remember it was Ian Alexander though It was a win for me 2-0
Keith faces off against Gill loses 0-2
Shajir faced off against Zi Mei wins 2-0

Round 2 Win
FoxHound VS Scuba Squad
Chun Li Vs Scubas Zi Mei 2-0
Zi Mei Vs Chun LI 0-2
Gill Vs Seong Mina 2-0

Round 3 Draw
FoxHound Vs UFS House
We won the die roll, very important. I immediatly wanted Gill so
Chun Li VS Gill 2-1
Zi Mei Vs Chun Li 0-2
Gill Vs Hanzo 1-1

Round 4 Draw
FoxHound Vs RIP Michael Jackson
We ID'd

T4
Round 1 Win
Foxhound Vs Voltron Kitten Force
Chun Li Vs Hanzo 2-1
This was game was amazing for 1 reason. I won game 3 because of the Yi Shan anti discard card dealing 14 damage sweeet .
Zi Mei Vs Seong Mina 0-2
Gill Vs Olexa 2-1

Finals Loss
FoxHound Vs UFS House
Important thing here... we lost the die roll. if we won we were hoping for the same pairings as swiss
Chun Li Vs Chun Li 0-2 turn 1 he goes first. i drop a soul my turn spinta, block, passes reversal Hoyoku Sen needs a 5 or better tops a 6 :S
Zi Mei Vs Gill 0-2
Gill Vs Hanzo ??? incomplete

Nice work Guys. About **** time huh lol.

Finals - 1am
Heres where fun times happened. everyone went to Mongolian BBQ (Mongolian Grill in Canada lol) and proceeded to eat/drink. Fun times, especially the Africa Tortilla!!
After this we went to the Hyatt looking for ppl... on the way i was getting my ass kicked by Ben lol lots of yelling AMERICA!! We got to the Hyatt and Bens drunk ass dented some guys car! woops time to go!!! we get in not 2 mins later i get a Ben's Spinning Backfist to my lip... Ouch! We finally find where everyone is and proceed to get drunk. Thanks Jeremy for the amazing navigation skills. As we're leaving some underage girl wearing no shirt walks buy and **** gets weird so we leave lol. basically went back to the room and slept. got harassed by random ppl on the street but whats new huh

Saturday
6am Shajir wakes up! doesnt he know what a hangover is?! says hes not playing, hell play Twilight Imperium GAYYYYYY.

So i get up get ready and leave, Walking + Sun + Heat + Kinda hungover is a REALLY REALLY bad combination!

Get there. meet up with everyone lets get this started! Shajir decided to play too. Keith decided not too (See record from yesterday)

Round 1 Vs Keenan Meadows' Gill Win 2-1
Keenan Meadows was fronting this gill. but it wasnt a lockdown gill!! no arrows. Game 1 starts fine. then i attacked him on his turn with a spike. he blocked and reversal spiked me... Ouch. Game 2 and 3 proceed better.

1-0-0

Round 2 Vs Dani Carpenter's Astrid Win 1-0
I heard about this deck being a beast. and it was true turn 2 she gets me to 11 and tries to finish me with a weak slash for 12 (WTF ITS SPOSED TO BE WEAK!!!) but i blocked with a spike. next couple turns i play some spintas to keep her board under control spike back to full with powerful style and end it 1-2 turns later i think. We dont finish game 2

2-0-0

Round 3 Vs Shane Duckworth's Hanzo Draw 1-1
Game 1 takes 30 mins!! a chunli vs Hanzo took 30MINS!!! wtf! he kicked me hard. it hurt. i knew there was nothing i could do at that point. Game 2 i win in like... 10 - 12mins. 18 VT is nice. Game 3 we dont finish

2-0-1

Round 4 Vs Magnus' Ibuki win 1-0
I heard this deck was really aggro so in my opening hand i drew all 3 tag alongs and didnt mulligan. my bad he NEVER used her ability. over time he wasnt drawing attacks i wasnt drawing the right ones then i got the kill in hand for game. we dont finish game 2 in time

3-0-1

Round 5 Vs Jeremy Ray's Seong Mina win 2-1
I was scared of this deck! so scared i thought i was screwed. This beat me out of top 8 at CanNats so obv it was worrysome. Game 1 goes as expected he spintad me to death. game 2 he wasnt drawing his attacks and checked most of them. game 3 went almost the same except he checked all his attacks early game

4-0-1

Round 5 Vs Matt Kohls' Chun Li Win 2-0
Final round of swiss what better way than winner take all for diversity? game 1 he had all the control but i got an End It All off then Spinta'd his Healers away, Spinta'd again, Counter the assault for + 4x2 and hoyoku Sen. Game 2 i saw an early spinta spinta hoyoku sen.

5-0-1 King Of Swiss (Sweeet )

T8

Round 1 Vs Garret Buett's Alex win 2-0
top 8s were wierd. it was Canada vs Canada, Ny Vs Ny, Ohio Vs Ohio, then shane and jeremey lol. So i managed to realllly outpace alex, didnt let him use his ability, and he was checking 1s both games

6-0-1
Round 2 Vs Omar Chavez's Zangief win 2-0
Hata had told me this was my worst matchup in T8, I disagreed. Playing Omar is always fun but i had no idea WTF he was doing most of the time. hes really hard to read. game 1 ended... somehow. i cant recall. Game 2 was very similar in that it ended with me commiting his board spike M1 hoyoku sen discard 1 Spike for 11 pass he uses zangief which i tag alonged. He also failed his flying power bomb :S

7-0-1
Finals Vs Paul Bittner's Akuma win 2-1
THIS is what my worst matchup was from what i knew. game 1 was pretty quick end it all did it for me. Game 2 was looooong so he took it. game 3 i let him go first he played some cards i went played some cards he went i reversal heel sniped him and willfuled his power committing his character. my turn spike fully multipled. he had a no memories to block but wasnt matching symbols on his rejection that wouldve been sealed anyways

Final record 8-0-1

Finally got u guys back for stealing our Nats!! lol. sucks that Paul didnt get the 3rd character for UFS house but he did get on cardboard with the asset. im happy i got the first for FoxHound. after some hugs and attempted **** and a flipped table we headed back to pass out cuz it was like 2:15 am.

Drove home yesterday and alls good lol.

Thanks for Having us. as i said i love the players. this tooook wayyyyyy too much writing. now i jsut have to figure out what my characters gonna do

Later

Mike

Link said:

Best line ever.

Also you tooks Ben drunken abuse all weekend like a man and won, congrats.

Congrats Mike!

Great job of taking one back for the Maple Leaf!

Canada! Oh man, US nationals was super fun this year, and I'm happy that mike won. Mike covered everything that needed to be covered pretty much.

Good stuff:
We got 2nd at Teams,
Mike winning singles
crazy story's that Failed2k told us (like someone taking a dump in his cup, ben peeing on him etc)
seeing everyone again like Red Triangle Green Triangle, UFS House, Scott Gaines' *******, Omar and all the other crazy personalities like dutpot. Finally met that wierd guy who gives long ass names to his decks... dragonfire(something)
ATL crew, it was a blast see you at gencon
mike being lost in the washroom cause Al Crocker turned off the lights
played a couple of games against hata, and he made me look like a noob and was attacking me while I had him in the "lock"

Bad Stuff
My epic failure at singles... (3 hours of sleep, tired, hung over and losing twice before I dropped) but I got to kick some ass in ticket to ride and got curbed stombed in a game of twilight imperium
Getting a body glove from Al crocker and squeeling like a girl
Naked fugly chick that was 16 years old... (awkward)
walking 40 minutes to get to and from the con
Spiral arrow banned, must make new deck

sir_shajir said:

Did you pull an omar and get your deck banned? So it is offical then, its really going?

bloodocean said:

It wasnt exactly him, it was like half the meta and when steve found out how it worked and didnt allow you to actually play the game when it was going on, he announced he was going to ban it (probably in the july sotg)

Agreed, you played incredibly well under pressure and were a joy to watch win the thing.

I will repeat, my apologies for giving you such a lame match top 8, my deck didn't cooperate at all in our match and yours was hitting 6s.

I knew that your deck would go on to win after our match up, and was not surprised you found Akuma in the final. You can ask anyone and everyone I've talked to since Regionals (May), I have clearly stated that the strongest character in the game right now is Akuma, but Chun-li has better attacks and a kill condition that doesn't take 4+ turns to set up (or a draw into 4+ attacks and standard Evil ineup) and is therefore a better deck .

The Spike/Hyoko/Spinta/Snipe lineup (in particular the first 3 that are the most damaging and can pretty much kill in one-two shots) is what sets Chun-li apart from Akuma at the moment.

You played like a champ, with what was easily the best built deck in the tourney - except... you are going to have to explain to me why you weren't running Undercover Agent, that thing does wonders against Order and Evil, both of which play the same ability more than once a turn and often.

Other than that ommission your deck was flawless in my mind.

All the best, and I hope we can have a rematch (me with a more reliable deck), come Gencon.

- dut

According to Failed2k, Tanner built the deck, and I spread it like the aids that it was by taking it to Montreal, showcasing it at Oshawa regionals (i was the host) and Placing 4th at Can Nats...
But honestly it was too much, it was used in every teams deck, and most of em were gill+chunner+evil deck (ussually hanzo kick)

We thought undercover agent worked after the 3rd trigger, and thought it was garbage (i guess we misread the card or something) and there was really no space in the deck for it + I believe it's a three difficulty foundation in a deck with lots of 2's and 1's.

FenMiHuo said:

So wait, he didn't know how it worked this whole time? Kind of odd there. Ah well, there were ways around it, but whatever I guess, doesn't hurt anything I had planned.

DaiAndOh said:

Probably more like the extent to which it worked, anyway just wait for the sotg and it will probably be announced

Congrats Mike! Our game in swiss was pretty nice. 30 mins for Hanzo vs Chun-Li is kinda ridiculous. I'm glad I gave you your only non-win of the day!!!

Great job Mike all air singles this year we'll see how well it does post bannings

Grats again Mike. For everyone reading this, yes the rumors are true and I let Mike Lowe win U.S. Nationals for a bottle of Canadian Ketchup. There I admitted it.

PaulBittner said:

LOL Paul great job btw getting 2nd and an asset

sir_shajir said:

I probably missed the rest of the showcasing.

Congrats man, your character card is gonna look great ( and you'll get good use out of The Bigger They Are...well if it were in that rotation).

Remember, the Gurren Brigade never loses!

good job mike! glad you got your sexy butt on cardboard!

First off, congrats to Link for getting the canadian revenge and winning a character. Second, ****. It kinda sucks for me that spiral arrow is getting banned seeing as how I only got to play the **** deck in one tourney. Third sajir spreads aids lol.

Congratulation Mike, you da man.

Link our match was 2-1 remember you even said your self pwned game one lol .. Anyways good report and congrats.

cannnnnaaadaaaa!

Congratz Mr. Lowe, your chun li deck has been beasting people since our regional, it was nice to see all three phases of it's evolution(Our regional, Can Nats, and us nats) and it was more then deserving of it's win.

Also lots of love to the canadians in general, and nothing but glad to see them have such a killer weekend(even at our expense during Top cuts teams)

Final 4 teams btw, since I literally have not seen it anywhere else

Voltron Kitten Force(Jeremy Ray- Seong Mi-Na, Andrew Olexa-Himself, Ray Andre-Hanzo)

Foxhound(Keith Drake - Zi Mei, Shajir - Gill, Mike Lowe - Chunner)

UFS House(Matt Kohl - Chun, Paul Bittner - Gill, Jon Herr - Hanzo)

RIP Micheal Jackson(Kirk Polka - Mignon, Al C Rocker - Gill, Noel Brown- Zi Mei)

ufs over rip

fox over voltron

ufs over fox

congrats Mike, your deck was beast and definately deserved the win. It was fun seeing you guys after like a 6 hour+ drive from the middle of the night and more energy drinks then my bottle could handle.

like I said, we'll celebrate with a Garbage Plate next time you guys come through Rochester.

Good Job Mike...You bet my locals down in Rochester, did a solid top 8 in Canada, and now you Canadians took our title. Good job Mike. I exspect a character card from you next spring when I get some sort of major tournament here in Rochester,NY to happen. But congrads. I won't be making it to Worlds at this point but you never know...I may make a unannounced appearance again...lol...finally...happy to see the spiral arrow to be gone...and hope we get more stuff to disappear from the meta so many of us can go back to square one on deck building. Just want to say...void can chew bubble gum (ie control and hold the board) and kill people (throw some lethal damage moves LOL) GO JIvatma/Rasotep for the win...LOL